y the eye and the memory,
and expressed in statistical tables.

We are now prepared to see why the colored population has been, for a
considerable time, declining in New York and New England. In those
States population is dense; all occupations which afford a comfortable
living for a family are crowded and the competition of the white man is
quite too much for the negro. If emancipation were now to be made
universal, the same thing would rapidly occur in all parts of our
country. The white laborer would rush in and speedily crowd every avenue
to prosperity and wealth; and the negro, with his inferior civilization,
would be crowded everywhere into the lower stratum of the social
pyramid, and in a few generations be seen no more. The far more rapid
increase of the white race would render the competition more and more
severe to him with each successive generation, and render his decay more
rapid, and his extinction more certain.

I am well aware that this article may fall into the hands of many
excellent men who will not relish this argument, nor this conclusion.
They will say it were better then to keep the poor negro in slavery. But
they would not say so if they would consider the whole case. If slavery
were a blessing to the black man, it is so great a curse to the white
man that it should never be permitted to exist. The white man can afford
to be kind to the negro in freedom; but he cannot afford to curse
himself with being his master and owning him as his property. On this
point I need not enlarge, for I am devoutly thankful that the literature
of Christendom is full of it.

But slavery is not a blessing to the negro, even in the view of his
condition which I have presented; it is an _unmitigated curse_. To a man
of governed passions and virtuous life, it is infinitely better to be an
unmarried freeman, enjoying the comforts of this life, and the hopes of
the life to come, than to live and die a slave, and the parent of an
interminable posterity of slaves. To a being of vicious life and
ungoverned passions, all life is a curse, whether in slavery or freedom;
and it surely is not obligatory on us, or beneficial to the colored man,
to preserve the system of slavery for the sake of perpetuating a
succession of such lives down through coming generations.

Slavery, by forced and artificial means, propagates society from its
lowest and most degraded class, from a race of barbarians held within
its bosom from generation